In this episode, we have a special guest, Joel Pollack, founder of the California Post, join us to talk about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and the new book, God's Debris, by Scott Adams.
00:02:25.380We chat about whatever topics we think is fun, whether it's AI or it's news or current events or a reframe from Scott's Reframe Your Brain book.
00:02:37.200And so we're just here in good faith, good fun, keeping Scott's legacy going the best way we can.
00:02:45.660So let's remember that, and how about we all get ready for what you're here for.
00:05:16.740And I will tease a future discussion about that by referring to the red and black plaid blanket that you can see over there behind our wonderful host.
00:05:32.700And it has a very important significance, which I don't think many viewers realized or recognized.
00:06:03.240And there's a lot of news about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:06:05.000One of the pieces of news is that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey, Democrat and Republican, were given access to the unredacted Epstein files yesterday.
00:06:19.480And Ro Khanna was one of Scott's favorite members of Congress, not necessarily because he supported him, but because Ro Khanna is a Bernie Sanders type left wing Democrat, Democratic socialist who represents Silicon Valley and who's very smart and yet often says really crazy things.
00:06:41.540So Scott appreciated some of his smart insights and his skills, his talent stack, if you will, while also making fun of, for example, his recent support for the billionaire tax, which Scott thought was crazy.
00:06:55.860He also liked Thomas Massey without having to agree with everything Thomas Massey said or did, because Thomas Massey understands economics and would often take a rational approach to public policy issues.
00:07:10.960Thomas is also independent, and he doesn't shy away from criticizing President Trump, which sometimes gets on President Trump's nerves.
00:07:56.580But the simplest reason is that, as they said, we want the truth to come out on its own and we don't want to impugn people or start dragging people through the mud and that kind of thing.
00:08:08.440Well, that's the reason the basic reason most of these files weren't released in the first place.
00:08:13.720There are a lot of people mentioned in the files who had nothing to do with any of Epstein's crimes, who might have emailed him or asked him for money or whatever.
00:08:23.100My favorite case of mistaken identity in the files is Tony Hawk, the skateboarder, who we did a story about at the Post.
00:08:30.760He has been married four times and he was mentioned in the Epstein files because a woman who was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein said she remembered his wedding on the island.
00:08:41.760The problem was he never got married on the island.
00:08:46.780He got married in Fiji, but he did not get married on Epstein's island.
00:08:51.820The problem, and this is where the mistaken identity comes in, aside from being misidentified by this victim, he had a photographer at one of his weddings named Mark Epstein.
00:09:03.600And Mark Epstein is also the same name as the brother of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:09:08.560So if you were looking to kind of reinforce your idea that Tony Hawk, the skateboarding pioneer, had hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, well, that was your proof.
00:09:16.380And you could find it all over the newswires because Mark Epstein had uploaded his photographs to Getty Images.
00:09:23.020But as Tony Hawk pointed out, it's not the same Mark Epstein.
00:09:28.900You know, you kind of use the same names over and over again, almost as a wink from the simulation that we're living in a simulation.
00:09:36.140So one of the reasons these files have been protected for so long or kept under wraps is to protect people who might be completely innocent.
00:09:46.780And it's not the only case of mistaken identity.
00:09:49.040There was another famous one, which is not really worth going into right now.
00:09:52.600But there are some people who are guilty and who are having to deal with some very poor judgment decisions made with their association with Epstein.
00:10:01.400But there are some people who are not.
00:10:03.120Anyway, I just thought it was funny that these two members of Congress who you would think would come out and blow the whole story wide open, came out and said, we can't tell you everything we saw.
00:10:13.660So anyway, that's not even the biggest story about the Epstein files today.
00:10:18.580The biggest story is that one of the files has a 302 from the FBI.
00:10:26.540302 is the form that they use for interviews of people who've come to them with information.
00:10:33.120Or interviews of potential witnesses or even targets.
00:10:38.300And there's a 302 from 2019, six years ago, which is, I believe, when Epstein was taken back into custody, where someone the FBI was interviewing said that they got a call from Donald Trump.
00:10:54.640They received a call a decade and a half before, in 2006.
00:11:00.000Trump called the police as soon as he heard that Epstein was under investigation.
00:11:04.560And he said that Jeffrey Epstein was a bad guy, that he had been seen around younger women, that Trump had left as soon as he got wind of it, that he had kicked him out of the Mar-a-Lago club.
00:11:17.960And he said the FBI should focus on Epstein's associate, Maxwell, whom he described as evil.
00:11:24.560So this has gone super viral, this story, because it does seem to prove not only did Donald Trump not participate in Epstein's crimes, but he led the way in hoping to have Epstein investigated and telling the FBI and the police that Epstein needed to be investigated.
00:11:46.640So I had a couple of comments on that earlier today.
00:11:50.440My initial comment was probably like that of many people watching this show, which was to say, well, that ends the Democrats' interest in Jeffrey Epstein, because the whole point of turning this scandal from a scandal about the Clintons into a supposed scandal about Trump was to simply flip it on its head and project and say, oh, well, there must be something bad about Trump in there,
00:12:15.140because we know they were friends 20 years ago, so Trump might have been, I mean, I get this all the time in my responses from trolls on social media, Trump's a pedophile, Trump's been, you know, none of that is true, but they're trying to associate him with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:12:30.880And it's an association that is very rhetorically effective, and Scott would say it's a good persuasion technique, even if there's no truth to it at all.
00:12:39.000And you can argue maybe the Trump Department of Justice mishandled it by saying they were releasing Epstein files when they called a bunch of conservative social media influencers, and they said, come on over, we're going to give you the full files.
00:12:53.700And the influencers came, and they held up big binders, and of course, the full files were still behind closed doors and locked filing cabinets.
00:13:03.640But anyway, I thought, okay, well, this kind of ends it.
00:13:07.080I mean, you won't hear much from the Democrats anymore about the Epstein files, because now they exonerate Trump.
00:13:13.080Well, then I thought about it a little bit more.
00:13:46.780The Miami Herald told the story, and they included all the same facts that Trump had called the police,
00:13:50.960and they had heard that Epstein was a bad guy and so forth.
00:13:54.680But the main idea of the story was very different.
00:13:59.400The main idea of the story was that the fact that Trump called the police and said that he had known about Jeffrey Epstein and his proclivity for young teenage girls,
00:14:11.000that proved, according to the Miami Herald, that Trump had lied to reporters in 2019 when he said that he didn't know about anything Jeffrey Epstein did.
00:14:21.660So reporters asked, were you aware of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes?
00:14:24.900And Trump said, no, I never heard about it.
00:14:28.500You can imagine Trump knowing about it at one point and then forgetting about it or knowing about it but not wanting to tell reporters about it.
00:14:37.340But either way, we now have what Scott used to call two movies on one screen.
00:15:25.380So if you thought this was going to be over, which I did for a brief moment, I think you're mistaken because we have two movies on one screen.
00:15:37.240The facts are that Donald Trump was never associated with anything bad about Epstein, that he kicked Epstein out of his club when Epstein was misbehaving.
00:15:47.680And now we know that he also reported Epstein to the police.
00:15:50.400Now, you can argue if you're on the left, well, Trump only did that because maybe he was afraid of things that would come out about him or that he knew about what Epstein was doing and he didn't do anything about it earlier.
00:16:16.260And it's one of the things that makes it very frustrating when you're trying to talk to people on the other side or even just watching a supposedly neutral news outlet like CNN, which is that they seem unaware that there's another movie happening.
00:16:36.020And I think conservatives are a little bit more aware because people on the left are more vocal about their views.
00:16:42.800They feel less afraid to share their views and our media tend to reflect their views.
00:16:47.460So you can't really escape their views.
00:16:49.460And so I think we're a little bit more familiar with what goes on.
00:16:53.160But it's not like conservatives don't have our own bubbles.
00:16:56.180And let me just close and we'll open it to questions by talking about the Super Bowl.
00:16:59.800OK, so the Super Bowl was a pretty boring game.
00:17:03.040I watched all of it and, you know, interesting from a football perspective in some ways, the Seahawks played incredibly well.
00:17:11.680New England did it all right, but their quarterback just couldn't crack the Seahawks defense.
00:18:12.020And all you have to know about the halftime show is go back.
00:18:15.700I actually did this on Saturday night.
00:18:17.740Go back and watch the best halftime shows and see what made a really good Super Bowl halftime show.
00:18:24.160Super Bowl halftime shows, they don't have to be rock and roll.
00:18:26.940There was a really good one in L.A. a few years ago that was rap.
00:18:30.860But basically, a Super Bowl halftime show is an arena performance.
00:18:35.840The worst one I think we had seen before Bad Bunny was with the weekend when he walked through that fun house of mirrors.
00:18:41.340You know, whenever they make it really small, it's bad.
00:18:45.220And that was the mistake they made with Bad Bunny.
00:18:47.320It was entertaining, but it wasn't right for the Super Bowl.
00:18:49.900It was basically a small performance with a camera following him through all this grass and kind of recreating a sugarcane field in Puerto Rico.
00:18:58.040It's not clear what the Puerto Rican connection is to football at all.
00:20:57.320And that wasn't sort of a throwback, but he brought on the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
00:21:00.260And even though there was a big scandal the next day because it turned out that Flea, the bass player, had basically faked his bass playing.
00:21:07.520He had a track going instead of the actual bass.
00:21:09.700I think because it was cold outside or there was some excuse why he didn't actually play the bass.
00:21:14.420But it didn't matter because if you watch a show with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in it, it's always going to be fun.
00:21:18.420So, I thought both shows kind of lacked the nostalgia and grandiosity of a great Super Bowl halftime show.
00:21:29.160But, again, two movies and one screen.
00:21:32.860So, people who didn't like Talking Point or Turning Point USA said, oh, it's just, you know, it's garbage.
00:42:03.580A top Iranian security official has traveled to Oman for talks with U.S. mediators on the nuclear deal.
00:42:11.800Amid continued back and forth between Washington and Tehran.
00:42:15.460This diplomatic push is sparking debate online about whether a breakthrough or escalation could be imminent.
00:42:21.660So, the last I've heard from Iran is, uh, their foreign, um, dignitary or minister or evil person, um, said that they're gonna keep doing nuclear testing.
00:43:08.320And, uh, the, the, uh, Oman has a prediction that there will be an attack, right?
00:43:15.680It's always, you know, and he predicted Gulf War I, right?
00:43:19.280So, in college and, and, and I, I think that that's gonna happen, but the, what I don't think is gonna happen, it's not gonna be a long war.
00:43:28.040I don't think it's gonna be a long war, extended war.
00:43:30.680I think it's gonna be just a precision attack.
00:43:33.500Um, just the way you have to handle weeds growing in the back of your yard, you just have to destroy them and, and, and keep going with your life.
00:43:43.400So, I think that's what's going on right now.
00:43:44.840He's deploying all the, um, uh, herbicide everywhere to, to make sure there is a nice lawn everywhere, nice property.
00:43:55.660And he's a, he's a, a, a, a person that cares about the community and the whole war is the community now.